As a rule of thumb, if you want to get your name out there and continuously make connections when traveling or attending conferences, having a business card is your best bet. While there are a variety of ways to make your business card, the costs of making them can be pretty expensive and it kills a ton of trees. Why not send your business cards via the web or your mobile phone instead?
It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we compared Nokia and Apple in the Internet mobile phone market, explored the new-look Facebook, checked out MySpace's moves to open up, and reviewed new products from Google and Microsoft. On the trends side we looked at what's beyond the API, asked how much downtime is too much for Amazon's online storage service, and analyzed the DRM implications of Yahoo! Music closing.
Google today announced that it is now indexing the amazing amount of 1 trillion unique URLs. Google's first index in 1998 only had 26 million pages and by 2000 that number had jumped to 1 billion. Today, the Google index is growing by several billion pages per day alone. Not too long ago, Google used to have a counter on the front page of its search engine, displaying the number of sites in the index, but they dropped this information from the site around 2005.
We received an interesting email from the social network Multiply, saying that Facebook's new design is "the latest in a series of enhancements that bear striking resemblance to innovations made by Multiply months earlier." Multiply accuses Facebook of copying it, saying that it has evidence of "a pattern of Multiply's social networking innovations being implemented on Facebook months, if not years, later."
Multiply goes on to list 5 ways in which Facebook has copied them in recent times...
According to various reports from the last Digg Townhall/meetup this week, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced that Digg will soon let its users create and manage their own 'sub-Diggs.' Digg's main competitors like reddit and Mixx have already given their users this ability, and Digg has been rumored to start adding this feature for a while.
As more and more students choose online courses either as alternatives to the traditional college experience or as a supplement, a lot of colleges have started to worry about how to prevent these students from cheating on remotely administered exams. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the U.S. Congress, too, is concerned about this and has added language into a part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act that encourages schools to fight cheating more effectively.
With the news coming out of F8 this week, it was hard to not get caught up in the enthusiasm for Facebook Connect, the new authentication methodology which will allow you to login to third-party web sites using your Facebook ID and port your friend graph from Facebook with you. On the one hand, you have to admit this is revolutionary. The web will be transformed from the still (somewhat) closed system it is today, to a massively social experience - it's the "always logged-in internet." On the other hand, the company bringing this web to us is Facebook, the same people who had to be told by their users why Beacon was a huge mistake. Do you trust Facebook to control the next iteration of the web?
Back when the RSS aggregator web site Alltop launched in March of this year, we compared it to another daily start page favorite of ours at the time, OriginalSignal. Designed to bring RSS to the masses, Alltop, like both Original Signal and Popurls, provides categorized selections of feeds that make it easy to scan a lot of news on a particular subject. Since its launch, Alltop has been adding new categories at such a fast pace that it has now clearly blown away its competition in terms of quantity.
Earlier today Corvida set a difficult challenge for RWW readers, based on a new service called 12Seconds.tv. The challenge is to say "ReadWriteWeb" 5 times really fast in 12 seconds or less. Now, it's well known that the name 'ReadWriteWeb' is a tongue twister - even I have trouble pronouncing it at times, and I created the name! Check out some of the entrants so far, very funny...
Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org - an online community for Android developers. As editor Steve O'Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google's mobile OS of late - an incomplete and buggy SDK, favoritism towards select developers, lack of transparency, and concerns that the platform could become fragmented and that Google has ceded too much control to carriers. But all those problems may fade into the ether if, as Gramlich claims in the last100 interview, "Android is for the masses, iPhone for the rich".
